Town Square

Myth of Consensus Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate

Original post made
by Jane, Professorville,
on Jul 18, 2008

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming.
The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science.
The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming "incontrovertible."

In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."Web Link

Posted by Walter E. Wallis
a resident of Midtown
on Jul 18, 2008 at 12:39 pm

Hansen, time to cash in your shares of Gore, Inc.
If Orson Wells had scripted a radio show starring Global Warming instead of invading Martians, would anyone have believed it was real? Perhaps some day Palo Alto will celebrate this LibLudd Warmie idiocy the way Salem celebrates witches.

The APS has not, as a whole, stated what was ...well...stated by one of its committees.

The global warming scare is great for nuclear energy, which is the only way avialable to us to get off foreign oil, in the next few decades. That is why Maggie Thatcher created global warming in the first place!

I, personally, don't buy the evidence about anthropogenic climate change, but is has been great for nuclear energy.

Do you always have to state the truth, Walter? Why not give it a rest for a while?

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions.

"In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years ... Mars, Jupiter, Neptune's largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth."

This is fascinating because the Mayan calendar predicts a new sun in 2012, the same year the sun is to reach is apex. I knew about the solar system warming at the same time. I knew that Mars and the planets were getting warmer like Earth and that it was because of a hotter sun. The sun has been acting usual and believe that the sun has been causing much of the glacier ice melt and hurricanes.

Posted by Walter E. Wallis
a resident of Midtown
on Jul 18, 2008 at 4:48 pm

Sorry to blast you into inarticulate, Greg, But when my team, the realists, has so few cheerleaders we have to make up in quality what we lack in quantity. No readers of this blog can say "Gee, how come no one ever told me this?"

Posted by Recycle
a resident of Crescent Park
on Jul 19, 2008 at 12:03 am

For Walter, who is hard of hearing:

"And here is how the APS prefaced the article.

Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions."

Posted by Walter E. Wallis
a resident of Midtown
on Jul 19, 2008 at 3:14 am

The witch burners are out in force on this. I repeat my challenge - use Hansen's magic box as gospel and tell us how much difference it will make, according to that box, if we give the LibLudds everything they demand. That would be science. Anyone ever wonder what the civilizations of Egypt or the Mayans would have been had their efforts been directed toward useful rather than decorative structures?

Half of the fossil fuels used by American households go to heating and cooling the house. Let's make geothermal heat pumps the norm in building.

Just heard about some mechanicaal fixes to solar cells that would double their efficiency.

And how about finally getting some real public transit systems in this state. I would gladly swap my air miles for a high-speed rail line down to LA. (with stops in San Luis and Santa Barbara)

I'd gladly take BART to SF even if it made its way down to Redwood City. I hate driving there and I hate parking there.

I'd gladly take the light rail to San Jose if they extended it to Palo Alto--we're paying for it, we should have it.

Fact is, there are some pretty basic things we could do that would make us more fuel efficient as a country. We do almost none of them--but Luddites like you have a holy fit about the very idea that there should be any changes in the structure of the energy industry.

Bush and Cheney's ties to the oil industry have really held us back--they can't think outside the box.

Posted by Walter E. Wallis
a resident of Midtown
on Jul 19, 2008 at 1:25 pm

My life has been dedicated to increasing the efficient use of energy, first generating it, then utilizing it. I have seen all the nostrums and heard all the magic box solutions, but none of it meets the smell test. And don't forget the rickshaw, a solution to unemployment and a great way to break "America's Love Affair With the Automobile."
T-Bone knows a deal when he sees it - a new field where the logical competition is being strangled by regulations and where you soak up beautiful government subsidies. Want some really good investment advice? Go into peakers - when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine you are solid gold.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions probably caused more than half of the "global warming" of the past 50 years and would cause further rapid warming. However, global mean surface temperature has not risen since 1998 and may have fallen since late 2001. The present analysis suggests that the failure of the IPCC's models to predict this and many other climatic phenomena arises from defects in its evaluation of the three factors whose product is climate sensitivity:

Some reasons why the IPCC's estimates may be excessive and unsafe are explained. More importantly, the conclusion is that, perhaps, there is no "climate crisis", and that currently-fashionable efforts by governments to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions are pointless, may be ill-conceived, and could even be harmful.

Posted by missed the point
a resident of Barron Park
on Jul 19, 2008 at 7:16 pm

"The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions."

This makes the point of the thread initiator, that there is no consensus. No one argued that there is consensus that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are harmless; arguments against that hypothesis are nothing more than attempts to dismiss the evidence for the initial claim and derail the discussion.

Posted by Walter E. Wallis
a resident of Midtown
on Jul 20, 2008 at 6:52 am

Part of the blame has to rest on Carl Sagan and his lying for a good cause; in his case it was "Nuclear winter" [et al & Sagan] and a sham computer program. The only real scientific consensus is that Global Warming generates grants. Technically trained realists like me are busting their rice bowls. As Snoopy put it, "...that old supper dish."

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